Parking Lot

The Canadian singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell wrote about parking lots in her famous 1970 song Big Yellow Taxi. She probably wasn't thinking of the flooding consequences in her environmental anthem. The widespread conversion of grassland vegetation and tree cover, which helps to absorb excess rainfall, for Houston's suburban development has created parking lots that have become flood zones now. "They paved paradise and put up a parking lot" takes on new meaning there with Hurricane Harvey: